Message from ad***@fu*********.uk?
Howard Lake | 6 August 2003 | News
If you’ve received an e-mail apparently from ‘ad***@fu*********.uk’ then please ignore and delete it. A spammer is ‘spoofing’ this and other businesses’ e-mail address to send unsolicited e-mails with a virus attachment.
We were surprised to receive a couple of spam messages apparently from ‘ad***@fu*********.uk’ for two reasons. First, UK Fundraising does not send spam or unsolicited commercial e-mail, and secondly, that is not an e-mail address that we use or publish.
On further investigation (into the message’s headers) we confirmed that the messages do not originate from us. So, if you receive such a message please delete it: it is not a genuine message from UK Fundraising. Even worse, the message comes with a virus-infected attachment which you most certainly should not open.
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Such spoofing is sadly common and there is little one can do about it if one is targeted. Certainly a number of UK charities have suffered from this and had to field queries from concerned or annoyed recipients. All we can suggest is that if you receive a spam message from an otherwise bona fide organisation, look at the detail of the message’s headers. You should be able to see the source or at least path of the message through various servers across the Internet. These should show that the “from” address is not accurate.
Although such messages can be damaging to an organisation’s reputation, the problem tends not to last too long. The spammers move on and target someone else. Perhaps the biggest problem is that some recipients or e-mail filtering systems wrongly add the e-mail address or domain name to a ‘kill file’ or otherwise prevent their delivery to recipients.
If anyone would like to share their experiences of dealing with their e-mail addresses being spoofed, feel free to contribute to the new media section of the UK Fundraising Forum.
Find out more about the ‘Mimail’ virus from the BBC.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.